No. 9: Nelson Diebel '96

Search for Nelson Diebel '96 on Google Images and the first hit is an eBay auction of his Sports Illustrated for Kids trading card. For any other athlete, the card would be an honor in itself, but for Diebel it meant much more. It symbolized the extent to which he had turned his life around. Once a rebellious hothead that no responsible mother would ever want her kids to emulate, Nelson had slowly won over the hearts of Americans and transformed himself into an athlete that the national media was peddling to its youth.

Born in Chicago, Diebel ran into trouble at a very early age. He was always an excellent swimmer, but after getting kicked out of his second-grade school for beating up a classmate, it looked as though his extraordinary talent might go to waste.

That's when Chris Martin, the legendary swimming coach at the Peddie School in Hightstown, N.J., and a U.S. Olympic swim team assistant, took Diebel under his wing. Martin got the troubled Diebel into Peddie and for the next five years pushed the young phenom to better himself.

During his junior year in high school, Diebel jumped off a ledge 20 feet above his high school pool. He landed to the right of the pool and broke both his wrists, but even then Martin refused to let him go.

Diebel eventually recovered from the injury, graduated from Peddie and came to Princeton, where his swimming career began to stall. Chronic pain in his shoulder, caused by an inflamed rotator cuff that would never heal, left him out of action during most of his freshman year. After swimming, Diebel could barely lift his arm above his shoulder and it was not unusual to see him around campus with a giant ice pack taped to his right shoulder.

Still, Diebel refused to give up and on March 1, 1992, he swam the 100-meter freestyle in 54.48 seconds, then the fastest time ever swum by an American. Just four months later, Diebel was a member of the U.S. swim team that went to Barcelona to compete in the 1992 Summer Olympics, where, much as it did with the young Andre Agassi, the public latched on to the lovable badass American rebel.

Diebel won the first American gold medal of the games with a stunning upset in the 100m breaststroke. Going up against Hungarian Norbert Rozsa, the top-rated breast-stroker in the world, Diebel burst off the blocks and never looked back. He made the turn first, gained even more time on the back 50m, and beat Rozsa by almost two tenths of a second. Diebel's 1:01:30 was an Olympic record and afterward, Martin gloated like a proud father.

"At 75 meters, it was over," Diebel's coach said at the time. "The kid just goes out and does it."

"I started thinking again that nobody expected me to win, and that got me going," Diebel said after the race. "It's a spiteful, childish thing to do. But it works."

In the Olympics, following each final race there is a medal ceremony in which the medal-winning athletes assemble on a platform and the gold medalist's national anthem is played. The classic Olympic image is the athlete standing, arms crossed, singing along with tears in his eyes, a culmination of a life's worth of training. True to form, however, Diebel refused to comply. Instead of standing, he paced. Instead of removing his headwear to honor the flag, he showed his patriotism by sporting a red, white and blue bandana. And instead of singing, he kept his lips pressed firmly together.

A few days later, Diebel won his second gold medal, swimming the breaststroke leg of the 4x100 medley relay. By then his story had become one of the Olympics' most prominent storylines. Sports Illustrated called him a "borderline insane hellion," and the New York Times dubbed him the "rebel with a medal." Even at the Olympics, however, the Nelson Diebel that everyone saw was only a shadow of his previous self.

He returned to Princeton in the fall of 1992, and swam on and off until his graduation. By then the shoulder injury had become a great burden, and it continued to deteriorate to the point where swimming became almost impossible for him.

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"I've accomplished things in my swimming that anybody would be satisfied with," Diebel said. "I'm not a greedy person. I don't need another gold medal. I'd just like to swim some more... If I can't, I've got a lot of things out of my experience as a swimmer, and I'm grateful for that."

Nevertheless, it was the lessons that he learned through swimming and more importantly from Martin that were responsible for his transformation from temperamental youngster to humble and grounded world champion.

"The things I was doing were very self-destructive," Diebel said. "Swimming was the path by which I turned around. Chris Martin deserves most of the credit."

As the National Anthem began to close on his second medal ceremony, fans were stunned to see Diebel choke back tears and move his lips ever so slightly to the song's final words. It was a sign of what was to come: a man who understood how far he had come, and was set to unveil the new Nelson Diebel to a world ready to celebrate his accomplishments.